Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist